Marketing moves fast. Some days it feels like the sales cycle is changing faster than the news cycle, and the ways we've relied on to reach people aren't delivering quite like they used to.
If you're in B2B tech, you may be investing in the same events and outreach that worked a few years ago, only to find that the people you're trying to reach are making decisions for different reasons. A buyer might still stop by your booth at a trade show, but by then they’ve often spent months researching on their own and narrowed their shortlist before the conversation even starts.
Consumer brands face a different kind of challenge. Walk into a store or search for almost anything on Amazon, and you'll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of options competing for the same purchase. Someone might buy because a product is trending, a creator they trust recommended it, or the holidays are coming. Then open a social app and watch how many of those brands follow you there, each one trying to convince you that theirs is the one you need. No wonder people are tired of ads (yawn!).
As marketers, we're navigating all of this with years of experience about what works. But the reasons people buy can change, even when the people themselves haven't. If we're making today's decisions based entirely on yesterday's assumptions, we could be overlooking the very thing that would help us connect.
I think we need to take a closer look at our marketing instincts, understand what they're based on, and ask whether they still reflect the audience in front of us.
Good Marketing Instincts Are Built Over Time
When Dollar Shave Club launched its now-famous video in 2012, it made a strong case that selling razors could be funny.
Founder Michael Dubin wrote and starred in a warehouse walkthrough that introduced the brand with humor and a clear point of view. According to Dubin, the company received 12,000 orders within 48 hours of the video going live.
It's tempting to call that a great gut instinct. And it was. But Dubin also had a background in media and marketing and had spent years studying improvisational comedy. He brought those experiences to a category that gave him room to do something different.
Strong marketing intuition often looks like this. It's the ability to recognize a possibility because you've spent time learning what captures attention, connects with people, and moves them to act. But an instinct that served us well in the past won't necessarily lead us to the right decision today.
When Experience Makes Us Too Comfortable
I've worked with enough marketing teams to know how quickly a successful approach can become the approach.
A campaign performs well, so we want more like it. A creator partnership falls flat, so we decide that type of creator isn't right for the brand. We may be right, but it's also possible we've identified the result without fully understanding what caused it.
Audience response can depend on whether the message reached the right people in the first place. Even when a creator seems like the right fit, the creative may not feel natural to their community.
Marketing instincts can lead us in the wrong direction when we mistake a previous campaign result for a reliable prediction of what will work next.
Timing, competition, audience behavior, creative, placement, and the offer all play a role. When we credit or blame one factor too quickly, we can walk away with a lesson that sends the next campaign in the wrong direction.
Two marketers can each have 20 years of experience and come away with very different instincts. How willing they’ve been to examine the assumptions behind their decisions can shape what they’ve learned from those experiences.
The Audience You Knew May Have Changed
One of the easiest things to do in marketing is carry an old audience assumption into a new conversation.
"We tried that audience before."
"That demographic doesn't respond to us."
"Our customers wouldn't engage with that kind of content."
I understand why those statements come up. Teams have budgets to protect and results to deliver. Past performance is an important part of the conversation. But audiences evolve, from the interests they develop and the communities they participate in to the creators they trust and the ways they discover products.
A previous campaign result tells you what happened under a particular set of conditions. It doesn't automatically tell you what will happen with a different message, a different creator, or a better understanding of the audience.
That's why I want marketers to feel comfortable questioning their assumptions and reconsidering them when new information comes to light.
How Audience Intelligence Helps Test Marketing Instincts
Experienced marketers have opinions about which audiences are worth pursuing, which creators are a good fit, and which messages are likely to resonate.
For a marketing team, audience intelligence means looking beyond the results of the last campaign and examining the people behind them.
We can look at the conversations audiences are having, the communities they participate in, the language they use, and the people they trust to better understand where our assumptions might be incomplete.
Those insights can help a team evaluate an idea before it becomes a campaign. They can also help explain what happened afterward, so the next decision starts with more than a performance report.
At RAD Intel, this is a big part of how we think about audience intelligence. We want to help marketers understand the people they're trying to reach and use that understanding to make stronger creative and strategic decisions. It's also one application of marketing decision intelligence.
The marketer still has to interpret the information. The team still has to develop the idea. Someone still has to decide whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. With a clearer understanding of the audience, marketers can make those decisions with greater confidence.
What Should AI Help Marketers Decide?
As more marketing teams adopt AI platforms, it's worth considering how those tools can help them evaluate the decisions they're already making. But before choosing a platform, I think it's worth being clear about which decisions you need it to help you make.
For one team, the answer may be which audience to pursue. For another, it may be which message will resonate, which creator has earned that audience's trust, or where to invest next.
A platform that helps generate more content certainly has its value. But generating more content doesn't automatically tell you whether you're saying the right thing to the right people. Understanding your audience gives you a stronger foundation for making those decisions with confidence.
A Better Way to Test Your Gut
The next time someone on your team says, "I know this won't work," I'd start there. Ask what the conclusion is based on, whether it's a recent audience insight, a campaign result from several years ago, experience with a different brand, or simply a reaction to an unfamiliar idea. Then look for a way to test the assumption.
If you believe an audience isn't interested, examine the conversations and behaviors that might tell you more. If a creator doesn't look like an obvious match, take a closer look at their community. If the team is confident a message will resonate, ask what evidence supports that confidence and what you'll measure once it's in market.
You don't need to test every idea with a six-month research project. A better question and a closer look at the audience may reveal an opportunity the team was about to dismiss, or provide evidence that your original instinct was right. That's useful, too.
The Best Marketers Keep Learning
I believe deeply in the value of marketing experience. The people who have built brands, managed through difficult campaigns, and learned how to bring teams together have earned their perspective.
But the strongest marketers I know are still curious. They're willing to revisit a decision, listen to an audience, and admit when something they believed needs another look. Experience should make us better at asking questions. The answers should make our next decision stronger.
